Civilization (n.) is a process in the service of eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know... the work of eros is precisely this.
Civilization (n.) is a struggle between eros and death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species.
Civilization (n.) is a way which modern man deals with the extremities of realities.
Civilization (n.) is an effect emanating from the superego.
Civilization (n.) is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
Civilization (n.) is created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.
Civilization (n.) is driven by aggression. It does not exist because of the love man has for fellow men. Rather, it is driven by the desire to oppose this primal aggressive nature of man... namely by turning feelings of aggression no longer outward, but rather inward towards oneself.
Civilization (n.) is largely responsible for our misery.
Civilization (n.) is the exchange of some part of one's chances of happiness for a measure of security.
Civilization (n.) originated with the first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
Civilization (n.) is tasked with obtaining mastery over an individual's dangerous desire for aggression against himself by weakening and disarming it and setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.
Civilization (n.) is tasked, as its actual raison d'etre, to defend us against nature.
Civilization (n.) began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
Civilization (n.) is not without cost — its advance is paid for by a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.
Civilization's (n.) first requisite is justice.
Civilization (n.) is the whole sum of things that distinguish us from the animals and serve to protect men against nature on the one hand and to adjust their mutual relations on the other.